OpenStack has emerged as the consensus forum for open source private cloud software. That of course makes it a big and complex community, with complex governance and arguably even more complex politics, but it has survived several rounds of competition and is now settling down as THE place to get diverse vendors to work together on a IAAS that anybody can deploy for themselves. It is a big enough forum with sufficient independent leadership that no one vendor will ever control it (despite some fantastically impressive efforts to do so!). In short, OpenStack is what you want if you are trying to figure out how to build yourself a cloud.

And by quite a large majority, most of the people who have actually chosen to deploy OpenStack in production, have done so on Ubuntu.

Canonical and Ubuntu play an interesting role in OpenStack. We do not seek to control any particular part of the project, although some of our competitors clearly think that would be useful for them to achieve, we think OpenStack would be greatly diminished in importance if it was perceived to be controlled by a single vendor, and we think there are enough contributors and experts around the table to ensure that the end result cannot actually be controlled by a single party. To a certain extent, the battle for notional control of key aspects of OpenStack just holds the project back; it’s a distraction from the real task at hand, which is to deliver a high quality, high performance open cloud story. So our focus is on supporting the development of OpenStack, supporting the broadest range of vendors who want to offer OpenStack solutions, components and services, and enabling a large ecosystem to accelerate the adoption of OpenStack in their markets.

It’s a point of pride for us that you can get an OpenStack cloud built on Ubuntu from just about every participant in the OpenStack ecosystem – Dell, HP, Mirantis, and many more – we think the healthiest approach is for us to ensure that people have great choices when it comes to their cloud solution.

We were founding members and are platinum sponsors of the OpenStack Foundation. But what’s more important to us, is that most OpenStack development happens on Ubuntu. We take the needs of OpenStack developers very seriously – for 14.04 LTS, our upcoming bi-annual enterprise release, a significant part of our product requirements were driven by the goal of supporting large-scale enterprise deployments of OpenStack with high availability as a baseline. Our partners like HP, who run one of the largest OpenStack public cloud offerings, invest heavily in OpenStack’s CI and test capabilities, ensuring that OpenStack on Ubuntu is of high quality for anybody who chooses the same base platform.

We publish stable, maintained archives of each OpenStack release for the LTS releases of Ubuntu. That means you can ALWAYS deploy the latest version of OpenStack on the current LTS of Ubuntu, and there is a clear upgrade path as new versions of both OpenStack and Ubuntu are released. And the fact that the OpenStack release cadence and the Ubuntu release cadence are perfectly aligned is no accident – it ensures that the OpenStack developers can always deliver their latest code straight to a very large audience of developers and operators. That’s important because of the extraordinary pace of innovation inside OpenStack; there are significant and valuable improvements in each six-month release, so customers, even enterprise customers, find themselves wanting a more aggressive upgrade schedule for OpenStack than is normal for them in platform environments. We support that and have committed to continue doing so, though we do expect the urgency of those upgrades to diminish as OpenStack matures over the next three years.

For commercial support of OpenStack, we are happy for industry to engage either with our partners who can provide local talent combined with an escalation path to Canonical for L3 support of the whole solution, or directly with Canonical if the circumstances warrant it. That means building on Ubuntu opens up a wide range of solution providers who can make the same high commitment to SLAs and upgrades.

For Canonical itself, our focus is on scale and quality. Our direct customers run the very largest production deployments of OpenStack, both private and public, and we enjoy collaborating with their architects to push the limits of the stack as it stands today. That gives us a lot of insight into the approaches being taken by a wide range of architects in telco, finance and media. We ourselves invest very heavily in testing, continuous integration, and interoperability, with the largest OpenStack interop program (OIL) that gives us the ability to speak with confidence about what combinations of vendor offerings will actually work, and in many cases, how they will perform together for different applications.

The fact that the traditional enterprise Linux vendors have now joined OpenStack is a tremendous validation of the role that OpenStack has assumed in industry: THE open cloud forum. But for all the reasons outlined above, most of the actual production deployments of OpenStack are not on traditional, legacy enterprise Linux. This mirrors the public cloud, where even the largest and most mission-critical deployments tend not to be on proprietary Linux offerings; the economics of HA single-node solutions just don’t apply in a scale-out environment. So just as Ubuntu is by far the most widely used platform for public cloud guests, it is also on track to be the enterprise choice for scale-out infrastructure like IAAS, storage, and big data. Even if you have always done Linux a particular way, the transition to scale-out thinking is an opportunity to reset expectations about your base OS; and for the fastest-moving players in telco, media and finance, Ubuntu turns out to be a great way to get more done, more efficiently.

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on Wednesday, March 5th, 2014 at 7:36 am and is filed under ubuntu.
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